Welcome to my 2026 project honoring the first quarter of the 21st century. In this extremely lax project I watch a movie from each year to hopefully give myself some insight with what has changed within cinema during this century. At the very least I’ll have watched 25 interesting films and paired them with a dinner inspired by the movie, the place its from, and maybe a little bit of nostalgia for the past 25 years. You can watch along with me or find out what’s up next by checking out the full list of movies.

Today’s feature is from the year 2015, we are headed to Iceland to line dance…

Movie: Fúsi [Virgin Mountain]
Year: 2015
Director: Dagur Kári
Country: Iceland
The Elevator Pitch: Fúsi is a simple man with a simple life: he goes to work, he plays tabletop war games, he lives with his mother, and eats at the same restaurant every week until he receives a gift of line dancing tickets that shakes from him from his routine.

How Was the Movie?:  

This movie was largely okay but I’m not sure I could recommend to anyone because it’s both a little too predictable and also a bit saccharine for me personally. I’m not sure I was in the right headspace to watch a movie about a good and kindhearted man simply because of the world we live in but I’m glad it exists. It’s not actually a very sweet film despite my feelings about it. The main character, Fúsi, is at the very least very “autistic coded” and has a lot of trouble connecting with people, getting out of his routine, and faces some extremely unkind people bullying, targeting, and judging him but on the other hand he also has friends, a family, and makes connections to the world in his own way and not in a goofy heavy handed way just in the normal boring every day way. That means that a large part of the movie is this kind of slow moving slog of daily life with little punctuations of interesting things.

I actually have the least to say about this film than pretty much any of the others I’ve watched because even the twist in the film felt a little too obvious to me. It was all very plodding and slow. It’s not that it wasn’t enjoyable to some degree but when you start having thoughts like “he’s always driving around in a car, do they not have buses in Iceland” you’ve kind of mentally checked out of the movie a little bit.

I’m happy for alternative models of what it is to be a man, to be a person in society but at the same time I didn’t think Fúsi’s life before the movie started was actually a problem? He would have been fine either way making the ending of the film feel like another thing that he was just lightly bullied into. 

There is surprisingly little tech in this movie about a weird mostly loner guy in 2015 actually. 

What was for Dinner?: 

There’s actually not a ton of Icelandic dishes out there in the wild but I found this one, Plokkfiskur, extremely interesting and also very doable! Plokkfiskur is kind of like a stew but it’s also just kind of like a thick soup. We don’t really have great English terms for this kind of food and in my mind it was the most similar to the filling in a Japanese creme croquette because it’s the same formula of a bechamel with fish in it, you simply also add riced potatoes to the mixture. 

It’s very easy to make and this time I figured out what went wrong last time I made a fish dish and that was I was assumed I remembered all of the Estonian names for fish (despite ordering only 2-3 of them ever) and I had accidentally ordered catfish which I personally cannot stand. I corrected that this time and I’m here to tell you that Iceland’s premier comfort food is fine actually. This was a shockingly inoffensive dish that is extremely filling because it is a one-two punch of potatoes and bread. It’s easy to see why this was a staple that held people over in fishing towns when money was tight. There’s more you could do to this dish to make it interesting (my husband added chopped pickles into his) but while I’m grateful for the experience I’m probably at my lifetime personal limit of plokkfiskur. 5/10, shockingly okay.

That’s it for 2015, see you in the future year of 2016!